Thoughts on ZORRO, Part 6: The 1990 series & Queen of Swords (spoilers)

The 1990 Zorro series was produced by New World Television (and several international partners) and aired on what was then called The Family Channel (later Fox Family, then ABC Family, and now Freeform). (Somehow I’d misremembered it as a Disney Channel series, even before I knew the previous two Zorro TV series were from Disney.) It ran for 88 episodes, in three 25-episode seasons and one 13-episode season, making it the longest-running English-language Zorro TV series. Its supervising producer and head writer was Robert L. McCullough, who’d briefly been a producer on Star Trek: The Next Generation’s second season and written two of its weaker episodes, “The Icarus Factor” and “Samaritan Snare.” Veteran writer/producer Bruce Lansbury (Mission: Impossible, Wonder Woman, Buck Rogers, Murder: She Wrote) wrote a half-dozen episodes, and the show was the debut of one of the top modern TV writers, Tim Minear (Angel, Firefly, Wonderfalls, Dollhouse, American Horror Story), who contributed…